This is a combination of effects that will greatly enhance keying for DV orginated footage.
The original recipe (invented by Mats Olsson) is a combination of Channel Combiner (to go from RGB to YUV space),
Channel Blur (to blur the green and blue channels, which will reduce some of the noise in those channels and avoid
the horrible blocky edges you can get), and then a second instance of Channel Combiner to jump back to RGB space.

Add Keylight to the mix (color pick your green or blue screen) and you have what I'd call as close as possible to a perfect key (if your footage is not too bad, but this preset will also work on poorly lit footage).

If I start out with this image, which is a good example because it is a low res jpeg, that also is not so well lit (see the shadow of the arm on the background, the seam in the green fabric and all the shadows).

I apply the preset, and I end up with this not bad looking result (considering the source), with basically one click.

This is a very handy animation preset. I just added a link to this thread from the "Keying overview" section of After Effects CS3 Help. One thing that I mention there is that the version of the Keylight effect that this animation preset refers to is different from the one included with After Effects CS3, so users will have to tweak the animation preset to use the new Keylight (1.2) effect.

BTW, I encourage all of you to use the Add Comment button at the bottom of each After Effects Help page on the Web to add links that point from Help to threads on this forum. There's a lot of useful stuff here, and users would certainly benefit from having links from relevant Help pages to scripts, presets, and expressions provided in this forum.

Thanks so much for this great preset! My footage was so bad I had soft blurred edges (almost like a light wrap). I added a Levels effect after Keylight (selected only Alpha) and pulled the whites and blacks into the middle, its like a more refined Black & White clip. It really created a clean edge but didn't eat into the details (like around the ears).

So I have some half-decent DV greenscreen footage (MOV re-wrapped from MTS AVCHD footage) at a good resolution. In AE CS4, I've made a garbage mask around my footage, and I have the KeyerforDV preset for Keylight 1.2 (yes, I checked for the proper version). I select my footage layer, apply the preset... and all I see is my mask with a feathered green glow inside (see the attached image for what I get "out of the box" when I apply it).

Any idea what's going on here? Does it have to do with the mask? If so, is there a way to garbage matte something and still be able to use your great preset? Please let me know!

Thank you,

Mattynabib

Attachments

This is what happens when I apply the preset to my masked green screen footage.